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Building Up Social Capital to Strengthen Communities

Neal Gorenflo launched the sharing economy-focused news site Shareable in 2009, shortly after the beginning of the modern day sharing economy. A few years earlier, Gorenflo had an epiphany that led him to redirect his life from one that revolved around transactions to one that revolved around transformations. Gorenflo hopes that Shareable, now almost a decade old, will help other people see new possibilities for ways in which sharing platforms can exist alongside and complement more traditional capitalist organizations. We don’t think the commons should be an end-all replacement for everything, Gorenflo said, but we do think it should be of heightened importance.

Like other early sharing economy pioneers, Gorenflo laments the diluting of the social and environmental connotations of sharing. Yet despite the emergence of large corporations in the sharing space, Gorenflo argues in favor of the benefits of the sharing economy for people and communities. Research shows that a well-connected community with lots of social capital can pursue opportunities and rebound from setbacks more quickly and effectively, Gorenflo says. The distinguishing characteristic of the human species, he points out, is that we can collaborate and share effectively at scale. He sees an inverse relationship between the economy at large and the sharing economy—when the economy as a whole experiences a downturn, the sharing economy surges as people seek alternate ways of paying the bills and making ends meet.

The goal of Shareable, according to Gorenflo, is to help surface solutions for the problems plaguing our 21st century society and economy. “We want to catalyze things that matter, things that help people,” Gorenflo says. Shareable recently released a book, Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons, that serves as a guide for urban sharing solutions. Gorenflo sees the sharing paradigm as part of a larger civic movement, one seeking to counteract how out of touch politicians and CEOs have become from the public at large. Political parties deal mainly with big donors and big databases, Gorenflo says, and their roots in local communities have weakened. Gorenflo advises cities and city officials to leverage a drastically under-utilized asset: their people. We need to ask what kind of society we want to have, Gorenflo says, and work backwards from that to get what we want.